Forum Forexroasted

my real hit rate on it alone is unremarkable, roughly a coin flip, which matches your experience. what lifts it is context, a head and shoulders at the end of an extended trend, into a higher-timeframe resistance, with a clean volume or momentum divergence, plays out far more than one appearing mid-range or against the dominant trend. the pattern in isolation is weak. the pattern at the right location after a mature move is where the edge actually sits.

been with my current ecn broker for 14 months, averaging about 200 lots volume per month. commission is standard $7 per lot round trip. curious if there's a real path to negotiating this down or whether brokers just flatly say no to retail clients.

i've heard of volume rebates but never seen a clear explanation of how to actually approach the conversation with a broker.

i do a version of this, but the main benefit for me is counterparty and continuity, not fill improvement. on liquid majors at retail size the slippage gain from splitting is usually tiny. the real value is that if one broker has an outage, a withdrawal freeze, or degrades, half my exposure is elsewhere. i split for resilience and treat any fill benefit as a minor bonus.

take profit trader has been solid for me for about 8 months. 90% split from day one, reasonable challenge fees, paid consistently. they're not as well known as ftmo but the payout split is hard to beat. rules are a bit stricter on consistency requirements but if you have a stable strategy it's fine.

this is real and worth thinking about. market maker brokers profile clients. consistently profitable traders start to get their orders b-book with tighter risk management or eventually routed externally (a-book). you may not notice the transition. if you're at a genuine ecn broker it's less relevant since they're already passing orders to the market. at a hybrid broker the profiling question matters more at consistent profitability than at any particular account size.

the numbers tell you what happened, the missing fields tell you why. add: the reason you entered, your emotional state at entry, whether you followed your plan or improvised, and the single biggest mistake or good decision in the trade. the insight comes from correlating those with results. a ledger says you lost. a real journal says you lost on trades you took out of boredom while anxious and off-plan. thats actionable.

formal written escalation works better than aggressive tone. email the support team (not chat) with: date of payout request, amount, reference number, dates of previous follow-ups. state clearly that if it's not resolved within 48 hours you'll be filing a complaint with their payment provider and regulatory body if applicable. neutral, factual, specific. escalation threats without the emotional tone are taken more seriously.

current realistic benchmarks from firms actually paying well: wise 1-2 business days, bank wire 3-5 business days, crypto 1 day. anything inside those windows is normal. 7-10 business days on wire is slow but not alarming for a first payout or if there's a kyc verification step. beyond 10 business days without a clear explanation from support is when i'd start formal escalation.

ive used both. evaluation suited me better because the cheaper fee meant a failed attempt was a small lesson, not a big loss, and passing built confidence that the rules were achievable. the one time i bought instant funding i hit a tight trailing drawdown rule in week two that an evaluation would have taught me about for a fraction of the cost. pay less to learn the rules first.

the right expansion sequence: add one new instrument at a time, on demo for 2-3 months first. the demo period teaches you the character of the new instrument without risking your existing edge. gold trades differently than eurusd in terms of session volatility patterns, spread behavior, and news sensitivity. you need to accumulate that character knowledge before it's worth adding live.

key distinction: fade the initial overreaction, not the news itself. the question is whether the number was genuinely surprising vs what the market had already priced in. a nfp that beats but doesn't beat by as much as the whisper number can spike and fade even though it was technically a beat. understanding the 'actual vs expected vs whisper' three-way dynamic is what separates systematic news faders from gamblers.

ran vpn-based trading for 3 years before getting flagged. it works until they do a routine compliance audit. then they freeze everything, ask for identity verification matching the country you registered with, and if you cant provide it the account is closed with funds held for 60-90 days. eventually returned but very stressful.

your backtest result on isolated engulfing bars matches the academic research. in isolation they have weak predictive value. the context that actually changes the signal: location at a significant support/resistance level, preceded by a clear directional move (exhaustion context), volume on the engulfing bar notably higher than the body it engulfed, the engulfing bar closing near its extreme rather than the middle. all four together is a meaningful signal. one alone is noise.

news trading rules have tightened somewhat since 2024 in line with general industry trends. the5ers still doesn't have a blanket news ban but there are restrictions around holding positions through high-impact events depending on account type. check the specific account terms rather than relying on older community posts about this.

deposit an amount that is large enough to let you practise proper percentage risk, but small enough that losing all of it teaches a lesson rather than a trauma. for most beginners thats a couple hundred dollars, money you have genuinely written off mentally. 50 is so small the position sizes round to nothing and you cant practise real risk. 5000 is too much to lose while still learning the basics.

what actually happened to some traders during the various prop firm collapses is that the broker backend failed first and multiple prop firms went down in a chain reaction. the prop firm was just a frontend on top of a shared backend. this is worth researching - ask each prop who their actual clearing broker or lp is before you fund.

books that age well: 'trading in the zone' by mark douglas (psychology fundamentals), 'reminiscences of a stock operator' (timeless trader psychology), 'the disciplined trader' (douglas again). free youtube: jason graystone, the trading channel, no nonsense forex. AVOID: anyone promising profitable signal services, anyone showing only winning trades, anyone whose 'free' content is bait for a $2000 course.

small live account is much better. the execution on demo is usually perfect - instant fills, quoted spread. live accounts have real slippage, real spread widening on news, real partial fills on larger orders. an ea that looks great on demo often shows different characteristics on live due to execution friction. the difference is especially relevant for strategies that depend on tight entry timing.

the troll is right about the markup and it's worth calculating explicitly. on a major like usdjpy with a large differential the markup takes a smaller percentage of your carry return. on a pair with a small differential the markup can eat most of it. calculate your actual swap credit per lot per night and multiply by holding period to see your real return before fx movement.

the framework that works: think in terms of underlying risk drivers rather than pairs. usd strength/weakness is a driver. risk sentiment is a driver. commodity prices are a driver. when you have long eurusd, long gbpusd, short usdcad simultaneously, you're not three trades - you're a large short usd position. asking 'what's my total usd exposure' is the right question, not 'how many positions do i have'.